BEWARE THE CANDYMAN AND HIS “TREATS”

A hook for a hand, on top of a bleeding, mutilated arm is certainly frightening. Bees pouring from human orifices, merciless murder: These unspeakable things are absolutely horrifying. 

But the true horror of “Candyman” really shines from the background, from the modern world in which it takes shape.

Social-commentary horror is by no means a new sub-genre, and was not necessarily new even in 1992, when Candyman saw its release. Yet, this Bernard Rose-directed classic found an interesting angle that still manages to stay relevant all these years – an angle whose continued existence spells a terror that has affected so many people, so many lives, that this adaption just can’t compare, no matter how eerie its execution.

The film centers around sociology graduate student Helen Lyle, a bright and highly skeptical researcher, who decides to compose her thesis around the infamous “Candyman”: an age-old local urban legend featuring a young black man, son of a slave, who was brutally attacked by a white lynch mob after falling in love and fathering a child with a white woman.

Helen’s investigation takes her to the massive Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago (where she is based), a now-defunct housing project in the Near North Side, populated practically entirely by poverty-stricken African-Americans, where Candyman was murdered more than a century ago, as the legend goes.

What Helen sees and encounters in this neglected, tragedy-torn area is the basis of this movie’s central theme: how the suffering of so many generations of so many people manifests itself.

 In this film, that suffering manifests in the form of a corporeal, vengeful spirit; an embodiment of the seemingly immortal violence and heartbreak that has been crashing like waves against poor people of color for hundreds of years in the United States.

Candyman embodies a form created by those who believe in him, as Helen hypothesizes, though her interpretation is in a more metaphorical sense. But analyzing just what it means for one to “believe” what Candyman represents is a key part of understanding this movie’s work: Candyman personifies the socio-economic injustices of his time and ours, yes, but the residents of Cabrini-Green fear him more than anyone else.

They know what his existence, fictional or otherwise, means for them. The ultimate nightmare, that what they are going through and have been going through as long as they or their ancestors can remember, is immortal. Unending.

It is this that turns the imagery in Candyman from frightening to haunting, from unnerving to unbearable.

True, Cabrini-Green as it was no longer exists. The city project was essentially torn down with its iconic main high-rise in March 2011, almost 20 years after Candyman’s depiction. However, its former existence and continued legacy is mirrored in thousands of places all across the country. A legacy of forced housing segregation, institutional denial of basic public assistance in favor of simply ignoring the problem, deliberate and unyielding push-back against any kind of financial growth, individually and otherwise.

It is only one small example of the failure of our system to care for those in need, for those who may not even know anything but need.

Like the emotions of that kind of living, Candyman is eternal. He forever torments, as long as his terrible story breathes along with him. He is, as he says himself, “the writing on the wall, the whisper in the classroom…” He is what each and every soul living in Cabrini-Green and far beyond feel in their hearts as they look upon a future that never seems to get any kinder toward them. He is the sinking angst that can be felt between each word of an aching victim’s testimony.

  Candyman bears no concerning disfigurement on his face. He looks as though he could be anyone. Because he is anyone. At all times. Functioning in an environment that formed and still forms our entirety.

  “Our names will be written on a thousand walls…”

(4/5)